Facebook forward with latest privacy controls

Aug. 24, 2011 - PRLog -- Facebook’s decision to put more privacy controls into its members’ hands while they are actually using the service – not just tucked away on a separate privacy settings page – should be welcomed. But as often with such developments on Facebook, there are also reasons for caution.

As the FT’s Tim Bradshaw reports, the social networking site said on Monday that it will extend “in-line” controls enabling users to choose how widely they share information they post in their status updates, at the moment they are doing it.

For Facebook users, whether or not this is a response to the the positive reception for the Circles feature in Google+ is beside the point: it adds a new level of control at the point it is needed, and should also help to reduce the irrelevant updates seen by friends (do you really want to see what all your co-workers got up to at the weekend?)

In-line controls like this will start to appear in other places as well, such as a users’ profile page, reducing the need to resort to the separate “dashboard” that Facebook has long touted as its main privacy tool.

Letting users block references to photos in which they have been tagged from appearing in their own feeds is also an advance. There is a difficult balance to strike here, and Facebook is to be applauded for tackling what has been a thorny issue for many of its members.
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It won’t prevent friends from tagging pictures of you in the first place, but at least you will be able to retain control of your own feed. You will also have the power to block friends whose tagging you don’t approve of, or to ask them to remove the tags.

However, welcome developments like these are tempered by other aspects of Facebook’s latest privacy changes.

The power to tag has been extended: not just direct contacts, but anyone will now be able to identify you in pictures (before, they had to establish a direct friend relationship with you first.) Each time this happens it will only appear on your page if you approve it – but the control only extends to your own page.

Also, tags added by friends will still appear on your own page by default, unless you change the settings. And, as with so many things, it is the defaults that will prevail for most users.

These details matter. Facebook may be struggling harder to strike the right balance between the interests of different groups of users, but until the full implications can be digested, it is hard to pass final judgment.

This is the cautious welcome today from Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (as he points out, Facebook has been under the scrutiny of regulators, so needs to get the balance on these things right):

We are all waiting for the FTC’s formal announcement of the settlement with Facebook, following the complaints filed by EPIC and other consumer and privacy groups back in late 2009 and early 2010. The recent changes announced by Facebook  are consistent with several of the recommendations EPIC put forward in the original filings with the Federal Trade Commission.

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